amazon_syren

Today I sent out my very first query letter for my Glosa project.

I sent it to Metonymy press, the queer press in Montreal. They mostly do fiction and CNF, but have a couple of books of poetry in their catalogue.

So. I sent 10 poems out to them with an intro letter and a "table of contents" (probably more relevant to novels or CNF, but it let me get an idea for where I wanted different pieces to go, so).

Anyway. I have had wine and ice cream to celebrate starting this next stage of The Process (or the Journey, if you wanna). And now I'm attending a poetry thing on zoom (with my camera off).

Probably going to have to leave early, tbh, but may be able to duck back in. We'll see.

She says
walk barefoot
feel the breath
of the earth
under your feet
the way root
curls
around stone
the dust
and loam
the way your foot
falls
blur
and blur with
the passage of other feet
fox print and
raccoon paw
the tiny
hopping
steps
of chickadee
starling
the frost is in
the ground
iron hard
my feet will not be bare
but I watch
still
as breaths that cloud the air
for paw prints
treading
in the snow

So I'm sick.
This is irritating and frustrating, although part of me is enjoying the "guilt-free down-time" that comes with it.
the dishes are piling up like nobody's business, though, because neither of us is particularly healthy at the moment. Ghost is directing her energies towards finishing up for-pay leather work in the interests of making back the money she's lost due to missing work (the same bug + a doctor's appointment) over the past week or so. And I'm just a mess who can't go ten minutes without blowing her nose, apparently. :-P

None the less, We have emptied the last of the packed-stuff (er... sort of...) that was sitting on the living room floor, and it's now distributed appropriately around the house. And I've shifted some of the stuff in the boxes in the kitchen so that I was able to cart one box up to my Studio/Office (it mostly consists of lamps). The Studio is still a mess. I still have curtain rods to put up. And a mirror and a shelf (YAY SHELF!), and a slew of things to put away - ideally on said shelf - before it's a really functional space. None the less, I can at least move around in it, which is a help.

Still to do in The Studio:
Put up the curtain rod.
Hang the curtains.
Set up the rug (small, to go under the spinning wheel).
Empty the bags - one of winter woolies, a couple of bathroom stuff - into the appropraite recepticals.
Move the under-bed-storage-unit intot he bedroom and under the actual bed.
Move the beautiful - but fragile and ricketty - tea trolly to a different part of the room. Not sure where, though.

I have a list of books that I want to read this year:
Imogene Binnie's Nevada (novel - not sure what I'm going to make of the stream-of-conscious writing style, I'm a little worried it's going to read like Lisa Foad's The Night Is A Mouth which... I didn't like at all)
Dane Figueroa Edidi's Yemaya's Daughters (novel - though the prose is lyric & has a cadance like poetry - I'm looking forward to this one)
Casey Plett's A Safe Girl to Love (short story collection)
Trish Salah's Lyric Sexology (poetry)
Morgan M. Page's At Land (chapbook/novelette - I'm a little nervous about this one since psychological horror is absolutely NOT the kind of stuff I want to read[1])
Ryka Aoki's He Mele A Hilo: A Hilo Song (novel) and/or her Seasonal Velocities (poetry, short stories, & essays)[2]
Amber Dawn's Where the Words End and My Body Begins (poetry)
Leanne Simpson's Islands of Decolonial Love (short story collection - I went to a reading of this one a couple of winters ago)
Saleema Nawaz's Bone and Bread (novel - also: Hee! I went to school with her when we were little, and also when we were big. "I knew her when," etc).


I've got Morgan's novelette and Dane's novel on order - who knows when they'll arrive in the mail - and the rest I'll get ahold of as and when I can scrape together the cash to do so. But that's the plan. I can get Nevada from amazon.ca for about $20 (and Leanne's and Saleema's books for less than that), but Ryka's and Trish's books (in paperback) are both running at over $100, so... looking elsewhere for those, I think. I can probably find Casey's collection at Venus Envy, even if I can't find it elsewhere.
We shall see.

Links to Things You Should Read:
The Heat of Us: Notes Towards an Oral History - a short story in Uncanny Magazine that is absolutely glorious and makes me want to cry.
When Every Day is Judgement Day - Terri Windling on Perfectionism.
My New Year's Wish - Neil Gaiman on Making Mistakes (2012)

Anyway. So that's the world of reading.
I've started editing the first third of The Novel. I decided that it was probably a good idea to take a break from the content-production part in order to try and get the first chunk of Draft One tidied up enough that I could see the way forward a little more clearly.
It's almost 46,000 words long. Which is awesome, but also slightly frightening. The goal, right now, is to fix any obvious inconsistencies (stuff like "making sure I keep the names straight") and trim off 15,000 words of dead-weight, if I can manage that - ideally by combining scenes so that twice as many Relevant Events/Statements happen in half the space. Here's hoping.


Artsy/Creative Goals for 2015:
Get closer to finishing The Novel - ideally by finishing Draft One and handing it off to Ami_B for editing purposes
Write enough (and curate enough already-written) poetry to fill two manuscripts: "How to Cook A Heart" (an exploration of love, vulnerability, openheartedness, polyamoury, and emotional abundance through the lens/metaphor of cooking/growing/foraging seasonal food), and "We Are All Jezebel" (an exploration of the intersections of femme (empowered/autonomous queer femininity), slut (desire, lust, erotica), and sexworker (professional nake girl, pornographer, but also solidarity, and a bunch of other related stuff), with the idea that they'll be ready to perform, even if they're not much published, by June of 2015
Continue teaching myself to edit video with the goal of producing some sort of weird, dream-scape-y "music video" for a piece of poetry or similar
Learn how to make audio recordings using a cheap-but-serviceable mic and, perhaps, a looping pedal (or downloaded open source looping software) and try to do something arty and fun with it, ideally in conjunction with the above-mentioned video production
Sing more - both in terms of frequency and in terms of learning new repertoire
Grow food & make a garden - Not artsy, necessarily, but something that will feed me in more ways than one, so worth putting here none the less.
Figure out how to do contouring makeup, and get better at it


Anyway. So that's where things are at right now.


TTFN,
Amazon.


[1] Then why am I reading it? Because the author's an acquaintance of mine. Because if I want to do a show with her, it would help if I was familiar with her work.

[2] I admit, I'd prefer Seasonal Velocities, but it'll depend a lot on which one I can find at an affordable (read ~$20, ideally less) price.

Hey, you guys!
So I got a call from a temp agency, saying that they want to present me for a PART TIME reception gig that could be one month and could be six (medical leave) for a construction company out on Walkley Road.
Basically, if I got this, I'd be spending $6/day to have a two-hour (round trip) commute for a four-hour shift... which sucks. BUT I'd ALSO be making $13/hr (so call it $35/day after taxes and transit fees), five days a week, for at least a month, possibly more. Also it would be only one bus - the 86 - which is kind of a relief to know. And roughly half of my commute would be walking (lovely during most of the year, doable during 100% of it): 15 minutes to the 86 stop at the bottom of the hill. Then another 15 minutes (or there-abouts) to get from the 86 stop to the workplace. Alternatively, I could take the 95 to Hurdman and transfer to the 192, and that would get me there (in theory) in the same amount of time, but with less walking, if the day turned out to be crappy. Either way.

Anyway. So I'm kind of relieved to hear that there might be a job in the offing, and I'm hoping (sorry, person I'd be filling in for) that the current receptionist's medical leave actually takes longer to heal up than the bare minimum. I would like it if this gig lasted most/all off the summer (I think). Because it would give me some decent work, that I'm already good at, and would net me about $700/month... AND it would see me through to the beginning of September, when my day-time modeling jobs (which I would pretty-much be borked for, if I took this gig) will be starting up again, and also when all the summer employees go back to school and various Help Wanted signs might start turning up a little closer to home.

This could (maybe) be exactly what I need. Fingers crossed for me, SVP? :-D


In other news:
(1) I voted this morning - DONE! :-D

(2) Took a walk around the neighbourhood and chatted up a neighbour about their container garden (she works at the LCBO, and they straight-up gave her a super-dwarf apple tree as part of a promotion - I totally want to work there, now!) -- I have since found her on facebook (we have a specific person in common, so she was easy to track down) -- and I think we will get along just dandily. :-D

(3) My attempts at fermentation continue apace. Right now, my fermenting-tea smells really terrible. As in: It smells less like beer and more like farts. Which is, I gather, par for the course when using yoghurt bacteria (as well as yeast) to do the fermenting. I figure, if I keep it in the fridge for 2 months, and routinely unseal it to keep the pressure from building up too much, then I might just wind up with something ever-so-slightly-fizzy and delicious. But we shall see.


Still To Do:
Write 1000+ words on The Novel
Do Laundry (and change the sheets)
Do some dishes (I don't wanna, but they're taking up a lot of space)
Text Ghost the address, apartment number, and buzz code for my mom's apartment
Get myself out to my mom's apartment (leaving around 5pm) for my brother's 30th Birthday Get-Together

Ghost may or may not actually come to the birthday thing. She had a bit of a work-accident on Tuesday - seven stitches in her arm, but nothing torn or broken except the skin (THANK YOU all the gods(!!!) for that one!), and is fine but rather sore - so she may or may not be up to an evening out, depending on how her arm is doing (she's keeping a pretty close eye on it wrt infection, which is part of what that's about).


TTFN,
Amazon. :-)

Feeling somewhat better.
Told my lovely wife my Ridculously Convaluted Idea that would tie in Imogene's third opponent to her inherited house... and she said "I can totally see that happening. Also, you just summarized your book for me without blowing the ending."

!!!

So, having been told by someone that the idea is actually workable and not a giant cluster-fuck, I'm going to run with it. (I would have run with it anyway, but I would have tried to down-play it as much as possible, rather than trying to see what happens when I make it a major focal point in the story).

I'm so relieved.

It means I don't have to find a way for Imogene's Mom (Louise) to show up unannounced and uninvited on the premises (which is good, because I was SO not prepared to go there).

Also, my paycheque from RHO arrived AND I got my tax refund (thank you Mitzu, Mattaer, and anyone else who had a hand in that one), which means that the phone bill and 1/3 of the credit card bill are now paid AND we have eggs, tomatoes, and snap beans. Huzzah! :-D


Now to make pickles. And maybe some other stuff.


TTFN,
Amazon.

Have signed up for OrgASM (like Nano, but for smut).

Now to write fiction. :-)

TTFN,
Amazon. :-)

It is not quite 8am.

I have:
Made cranberry tea (which I plan to be drinking all day)
Taken the polish off my toenails
Left a note for the (theoretically impending) UPS delivery-person
Fixed my silver sandal (judicious application of hot glue to re-attached the insole)
Emailed a copy of my Harvest Erotica Reading piece to the ASL Translator
Checked the mail box


The mail box contained a number of Wonderful Things including:
My September Omikuji letter
A delivery notice saying to come and pick up (yet another) parcel - I love picking stuff up from the post office! It's like it's my birthday, but it lasts for a week! ;-)
A greeting card (from Ghost's mom, as it turns out, whom we'll be seeing tomorrow afternoon on our way to Toronto)
AND
Not two, but THREE, imps courtesy of Green_Dreams.

YAY! :-D

I'm very curious about this "Smoking Plum" that she included. It sounds delicious. :-D


So I'm going to toss on some perfume (WHEE!) and then put the laundry in and print out a copy of "Wolf and Scarlet".


Tralala! We're going to Harvest! :-D

Just submitted "Wolf and Scarlet" to the Leather Ever After anthology for consideration.
I'm proud of the story. I think it flows well and says something beautiful along with being hawt. That said, while I think the editor will like it, (a) Little Red Riding Hood gets done a LOT, and (b) My story lacks an actual element of the fantastical[1] (which may or may not be deeply required)... so I'm not sure if it'll be accepted.

I hope so, though! :-D

Also: I now have a writerly icon. The quotation is William Wordsworth, who says "Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart". Which is worth remembering. :-)


TTFN,
Amazon. :-)


[1] The red hood is, in this case, a red leather coat with chains flagging right. The wolf is (a) the top's last name, and (b) symbolized by the shaggy muppet-fur jacket worn by said top. The ears, eyes, and teeth pattern is alluded to, but not off massive importance (although there's lots of biting going on, as this is an S/M piece I've written). Stuff like that there. :-)

I signed up for Camp Nanwrimo (June Edition).

I have a "novel" that I'm working on, and figure that this will be some kind of a "tell the internet" push to Encourage me to keep at it.


I'm also checking out Inkscrawl as, who knows, maybe I can write up some speculative poetry that is (a) awesome, and (b) less than ten lines long, and submit it to them. Perhaps they will like it and publish it. That would be awesome. :-)

I have just written a "Tetractys" (with, granted, a slight variation to the form). Go me. :-)

I'm writing a blog post for Syrens.
I'm writing a blog post for Syrens that is turning out to be slanting towards poetry
which is maybe not that surprising because, when I let myself get vulnerable, show my hand a little, I dress my words in rhythm, coat them in simile, try to make my ugliness pretty. Bearable.
Bareable.


Anyway. That's where I'm at.
I need to return a library book shortly, so I figure I'll go do that.


TTFN,
Amazon.